How to Find Your Ideal Investor GTM Partners

Deciding Where to Focus

When it comes to referral partnerships, saying “We’ll partner with investors” is like saying “We’ll partner with trade associations.”

OK…and?

Factors like like industry vertical, size, geography, and existing relationships will all play a role in winnowing your list of Investor GTM partners.

But your success will depend on two tasks:

• Mapping the investor landscape for your ICP

• Building a novel set of partner criteria

An Example: Vertical SaaS

Integrating payments and other contextual fintech products is all the rage in vertical SaaS right now. The payoff is substantial; but the applicability and range of outcomes varies widely—not to mention team readiness.

A niche platform just getting its first customers is a very different prospect than a mature platform that’s been watching the economics of becoming a payfac slowly get worse each year.

In a prior role, I was charged with building a bespoke channel for investors who were curious about fintech outcomes for their vertical SaaS investments.

So I followed the breadcrumbs. I cross-checked our customers and target accounts with public investment data and generated a list of 250 firms who had some meaningful stake in vertical SaaS investments.

Seed investments, bridge rounds, acquisitions, LBOs. I looked at everything.

From there, I sorted the list based on how many times an investor showed up on the cap table of our ICP. This surfaced a group of about 20 growth-stage firms.

From Massive Spreadsheet to Ideal Partner Profile

20 was still too large a list to manage, so I developed a set of criteria to focus our energy:

• Frequency of investment in ICP v. “vertical SaaS”

• Presence of payfac(s) in the portfolio

• Internal fintech expertise

• Existing relationships

Over time, 3 firms emerged. They understood our value proposition and were excited to engage with us.

Most importantly, they delivered: generating the overwhelming majority of my contribution to our overall sales pipeline.

Quality over Quantity

Relentlessly re-focusing on partners whose goals most closely align with yours leads to a pipeline filled with high-quality leads.

In this fintech context, creating a novel data set and prioritizing based on clear criteria enabled us to identify and engage with the most promising investor partners.

Our ICP led us to our IPP.